COMFORT FOODS // Parádosi – Kalliste Hardy

In that bowl is something sacred, something only two people had witnessed the creation of. I ask Nene if this is what God felt like when he made the world. She tells me that we must feel better, because we never use a recipe.

ONE POEM –  Lola Dekhuijzen

Sometimes I cheated,
let my sheets stand dead still
in the supermarket queue while I
hid in bed. No one suspected a thing.

ONE POEM – Olivia Walwyn

First frost of the year
and the river is submerged in mist;
a blaze of sunlight
melting everything to dew.

ESSAY | Eating Khichdi in Kenya – Farah Ahamed

I was twelve years old when I first ate khichdi for ten days in a row. It was also the first time I heard the words ‘coup d’etat.’ That Sunday, my mother came into my bedroom at three in the morning and whispered I should move to her room. In her bed, behind a locked door, we heard gun shots.

ESSAY | Corn and Chicken and Death and The Return – Alan Weltzien

The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.

ESSAY | Why Bother with the Books? – Mia Cresswell-Melstrøm

Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.

ONE POEM – Adrienne Weiss

I find a seat,
hold a headache in my hands, cradle it like a rock
between fingers, think about how this birthday
will be soup and crackers and cancelled plans.

COMFORT FOODS // Sik Fan – Kimi Canete

In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.

TWO POEMS – Chloe Hanks

I remember the shape of the word rainbow
on her puckered mouth, how we sounded
it out from my bedroom window.

ONE POEM – John Dorroh

How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.

ONE POEM – Morgan Boyer

Rain upon me your turbulent tales of locker-side loves,
the gossip of girls whose braces still encase their molars

COMFORT FOODS // Gulyás – Liam Skillen

I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place. 

ONE POEM – Alex Stolis

because there’s no way he would ever find it,
being interested only in dinner/work/breakfast
/work/sex on demand/sleep/work.

ONE POEM – Elizabeth Seven

So next time you feel so anxious that you can hardly unlock the door,
remember that the world holds your feet

ONE POEM – Emilie Delcourt

one bright red strawberry on the strawberry plant

mist still low, tangled in the branches of olive trees

the way the pomegranates hang low
with the burden of their own weight

TWO POEMS – Cara L. McKee

at least the colour I’m told is
robin’s egg blue, like
boy-baby blankets, like
deep breaths of sunshine.

ONE POEM – Atma Frans

They’re small animals
wriggling to get out

Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle

ONE POEM – Satya Bosman

I know it’s over when I picture the train carriage
it’s an old-fashioned carriage with burgundy velvet seats
a little room in my memory.

DIGITAL ART – IJWBAA

Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.

ONE POEM – J.M.Summers

It is an old superstition.
The mirror, and the room
dark behind it but for the
flickering of a few fading
candles.

TWO POEMS – Hana Wilde

maybe they look down
at their bodies as they left them

in neat rows, heads of wheat
crackling green and gold

FLASH FICTION — Beth Morrow

We’re hit with a waft of espresso. The thunder of grinding coffee beans. The high-pitched hiss of steamed milk. Our wish is granted.

FLASH FICTION – Edvige Guinta

I told no one. Not my parents, not my older sister, not my little brother. I locked myself in the bathroom while my mother stirred tomato sauce and tasted spaghetti (we did not like al dente).

FLASH FICTION – Lizzie Holden

The water is so clear, the sunlight snakes across the rocks on the seabed, I can see the relaxed mottled skin of her arms below the ripples of surface, her arms leisurely open and close like silky breath.

ESSAY | I Could Sing And The Whole World Could Be My Stage – Isaac Aju

I do not know whether to say that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie saved me or to ascribe it to God as we always do in Nigeria. When we studied so hard and passed an exam, we say it was God who did it…It is popular in Nigeria for Nigerian hospitals to display on their signboards: We take care, but only God heals.